Archive for August 2007

Camille’s birthday, with pleasant Sigma 30mm/f1.4 results

Last night was Camille’s 25th Birthday Party and I only went out with my new Sigma 30mm/f1.4 lens. A pretty bold move, not carrying any backup lenses (I usually am with the 50/1.4 and 17-40/4L). Results, were fantastic. I can heartily recommend the Sigma lens. And on a 1.6x crop camera, you’re getting sweet results for not just facial portraits, but more life-sized/body-sized portraits.

Camille's 25th Birthday Drinks

Camille, the birthday girl

Surprisingly, most of the time, cranking up to ISO800 or ISO1600 wasn’t required. Above was shot at ISO400, not as sharp as I’d have expected, but the light was poor, and as with non-still-life objects, there’s always movement. Check out the rest of the set.

Next task, visit the Eureka Tower. Shot it in the dark last night (the view from Transport’s 2nd floor chilled-out-couches-area balcony was amazing), with not enough gear ;-)

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Colin Pichot

Not having played a game since Prince of Persia (and we’re talking the original game, with block-like graphics, on some ancient hardware, back in 1990), I decided to try out Second Life today. Surprisingly, the getdeb folk have this for Ubuntu, even in its 64-bit variety. Installation was simple:

  • sudo dpkg -i secondlife-install_1.18.1.2-1~getdeb1_amd64.deb
  • Realise that I’m missing a dependency, so install lib32asound2
  • Attempt to start secondlife

And fail, of course. I got a Window Creation Error. Not content with this, I started it up from a terminal, and looked at the error messages pass by. Finally found the rather telling line: WARNING: createContext: window creation failure. SDL: Couldn’t find matching GLX visual. It seems that its all got to do with the bit-depth of colour, so a quick replace of the DefaultDepth in xorg.conf was in lieu (it originally was DefaultDepth 16 but its now DefaultDepth 24).

Restart X, and I launched Second Life with success! Now signing up was a bit of a chore as I had to find a new name and so on. A lot of ideal names are taken up, so I settled with Colin Pichot. One of the things I quickly changed was how much bandwidth SL was allowed to use – quick reduction to 50kbps from its usual default (of like 700kbps+). I joined the Linux Australia group, I’ve not developed anything in SL, and I haven’t given them my credit card details (yet). It seems to create a group, you need to fork out $100 Linden Dollars.

I’ll play with this after midnight I guess, when we’ve got more “off-peak” quota to utilise, but initial impressions are its a pretty impressive environment in 800×600. I’ve not met anyone, I’ve added a friend (I think), can’t for the life of me figure out how to put a photo in my profile, and here’s hoping that eventually, I understand what all the fuss about SL is.

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Tab Cleanup

Twitter as a micro-news outlet
The other day, I was on a train, and witnessed something interesting – 3 drunk blokes were chatting up girls, got a little violent (throwing rubbish at people, asking a bloke to vacate his seat, etc.), and the cops were called in. Then, we stopped at Parliament and stayed there for about 40 minutes. On the last train of the night. Turns out, being an underground train station, a lot of other trains were backlogged, so Ben Barren told another train driver what the situation was, all thanks to the power of Twitter. What it looked like on Twitter – thanks Cris, aka Mr. Skitch :)

Google Code for Educators
Here comes free courseware, created especially for CS educators. There are currently tutorials on AJAX Programming, and Distributed Systems with sample course content as well. Video lectures exist just as well. So if you’re a busy professor, or sitting in a CS faculty and wondering what’s new and what might be hip to teach this semester, consider the Google Code for Educators site.

The Podcast Network
Cameron Reilly is the host of an amazing show, G’Day World, and he’s also the convenor for the Melbourne Online Digital Media. The other thing he’s done is create the world’s first podcast network (The Podcast Network – TPN). An interesting interview with him in an issue of the Australian Anthill, titled 24-hour podcast people. Cam’s a really interesting bloke to chat with – from podcasting to Facebook to Second Life.

Squeezed Books
One of the things I do after reading a management book, or biographies, is write summaries of my thoughts and take notes about it in my blog in my books category. This is what Squeezed Books is all about – summaries of books. If you’re too busy, or just want a summary before reading the book, this might be the exact site for you. Take for example the summary of The Tipping Point – now, when I write my quick summary/review, I’ll have to write less text :)

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Ruby Gems, Mono System.Windows.Forms on Ubuntu

I’ve recently started doing more development locally on my Ubuntu (Feisty Fawn) laptop (as opposed to being logged in via ssh to various machines, generally running Fedora), and have noticed some quick snags.

Ruby Gems
They’re currently installed in /var/lib/gems/1.8 which is not in your PATH. So if for example, you use cheat, you’re not going to find it. Fix it via adding /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin to your PATH (my .bashrc has it looking such as: PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin)

Mono, and System.Windows.Forms
I have no problems with Mono and .NET related applications, normally. I run Tomboy (which I like, a lot), I can fire up f-spot, and when I need to Beagle runs fine too. But of late, I’ve had to run an application that required System.Windows.Forms, aka WinForms. Little did I know I’d need to install the winforms stuff, so a sudo apt-get install libmono-winforms* fixed this for me.

This still hasn’t made my required application run properly, but I’m now a step closer to finding out compatibility with Windows-based .NET applications and Mono. All thanks to the useful Mono Migration Analyzer (MoMA). Hat tip to Ditesh for pointing me to MoMA.

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Google’s index is broken

I was just listening to an episode of G’Day World, and Cam was mentioning that he owned Australian culture (Google g’day and his podcast ranks #5 or #6). So I thought I’d Google myself.

I hit up google.com, entered Colin Charles, and to my dismay, my blog ranks number 3 in the list. Its preceded by:

  • Colin Charles Award Winning Wedding and Portrait Photography – it has the domain colincharles.co.uk and has a PageRank of 1
  • Music Books, Charles Colin Publ Brass & Jazz Methods… – it has the domain charlescolin.com and has a PageRank of 3

And then my blog, which has a PageRank of 6. The above two websites have got the strings colin and charles highlighted in the URL, of course. So am I to understand that if I wasn’t bytebot.net and had my name in my domain name, I’d rank higher? Or is Google’s index just broken?

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On MySQL’s Commitment to Open Source

Mike Kruckenberg, well-respected community member recently blogged about MySQL taking another step (away from open source, and I’d like to refute some of his worries. In fact, this is really more to drive away from what some within the community think is not kosher, i.e. change #5 in Kaj’s blog entry.

The sources are always available. Its just gone one step further, in that you need to use the Bitkeeper free client, and pull the correct revision, tags of which are always at http://mysql.bkbits.net/. From there, you are welcome to compile it yourself, and even make a binary distribution, all with fair ease thanks to the excellent build scripts. As MySQL’s CEO Marten Mickos has in a regular slide deck of his: people use the Community Server to save money and spend time, while people use the Enterprise Server to save time and spend money (ref. slide 14 [html][pdf]).

Mike says, “And I can only guess, but somewhere in the MySQL master plan there must be another blog post planned to ease folks along about closing off the enterprise source in Bitkeeper.” They say talk is cheap, so I’m not going to promise this will not ever happen in this lifetime, but I implore you to think about who makes up the MySQL development team — they are largely, very opinionated, open source types, whom will refuse to work on a code-base that they know isn’t open source. And going by Kaj’s change #1, which clearly states that there will be no new features applied to the current GA release, why are we really bothered about differing source trees?

The only real benefit in terms of sources and binaries is that if you’ve got Enterprise, you’re going to get your bug fixes every month, and a quarterly service pack to boot. If you’re on the Community tree, you’re just getting fixes once every 3 months, in a source release, that is sure to be built by the large and varied community MySQL have, for even more platforms than MySQL supports.

While Mike mentions the marketing message is currently stating that the Community edition is experimental and not ready for production, we all know that in technical reality, this is so untrue. MySQL maintains the same high quality assurance standards to any given tree, and I think this is why MySQL realised that putting community contributions into a current GA release was just not sensible — we all know that Jeremy’s famous SHOW PROFILE patch (the epitome of Community Contributions) introduced some server instability till 5.0.41. This is why the sensible decision has been made to push changes into the current development tree — to ensure high quality and standards are maintained in the current GA releases.

So let me reiterate: the Community server will never get unreliable with Community Contributions.

Note: Title has since changed… Hat tip to Marten :-)

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